Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXII

Then Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams welcomes then

Pope Benedict XVI to Lambeth

Palace, September 2010.  

Well, we have at least two validly consecrated Bishops among the four co-consecrators of Matthew Parker  on that 19^th day of December, 1559 in Lambeth Palace chapel.  But that is only our first hurdle.  There are more serious challenges awaiting us.

When Leo XIII declared that Anglican Orders were “absolutely null and utterly void” in the 1896 Bull Apostolicae Curae he did so not because there were no valid consecrators for the new Archbishop, but because there was defect in form and intention.

By “defect in form” the Pope meant that the words and ritual for the consecration of a bishop (or the ordination of a priest, for that matter) lacked in the essential content to validly convey the sacramental powers of a bishop (or, in the case of the ordination of a priest, to convey the sacramental powers of a priest). 

I must admit that I get very nervous talking about “sacramental powers,” not because I don’t believe that there is a spiritual power conveyed in the Sacrament of Orders but because that “spiritual power” has too often been misappropriated to give the priest a psychological weight by which both the sacrament itself and the people committed to his care can too easily be abused.  I think today there is a responsible reluctance to speak of “power,” but that cannot prevent us from looking objectively at the Sacrament of Orders and the fact that it conveys the rights, duties, and obligations to administer the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrament of the Forgiveness of Sins, the Sacrament of Anointing the Sick, and the Celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Saying that, however, over breakfast in the kitchen of Lambeth Palace that Saturday Morning, December 19, 1559 would probably have gotten an argument from the Archbishop-designate.  

At the time of Parker’s consecration, the actual “form” or words prescribed by the Anglican Ordinal for the consecration of a bishop are as follows:

 “TAKE the holy gost, and remember that thou stirre up the grace of god, whiche is in thee, by imposicion of handes: for god hath not geven us the spirite of feare, but of power, and love, and of sobernesse.”
 

Sixteenth-century spelling aside, there is, as Pope Leo pointed out, no mention of the office of bishop or the duties thereof in the prayer consecrating the new bishop and thus  Pope Leo found the form to be deficient. 

In the 20^th century Dom Gregory Dix, OSB the great Anglican historian of the Western Liturgy, would argue against Pope Leo’s conclusion, pointing out that while the prayer of consecration may not mention that the Holy Spirit is being invoked upon the candidate to confer the Order of Bishop, throughout the entire service there is a multiple mention of the fact that this was the consecration of a bishop and an outlining of the duties and responsibilities of a bishop.  

While we are at it, we should look at the ritual for ordaining a priest in the Anglican Ordinal.  It is considerably more focused and mentions specifically the duties to forgive sins, preach the word, and administer the Sacraments.  Leo judged it inadequate however because it does not specifically mention the Eucharist and in particular it does not speak of offering (the Eucharistic) “sacrifice.”

RECEIVE the holy goste, whose synnes thou doest forgeve, they are forgeven: and whose sinnes thou doest retaine, thei are retained: and be thou a faithful despensor of the word of god, and of his holy Sacramentes. In the name of the father, and of the sonne, and of the holy gost. Amen.

Dix argues here too, however, that since the rite retains the word “priest” and “priesthode” rather than “minister” or even “presbyter,” there should be sufficient context so as to understand the actual prayer of ordination as meaning to continue the ministry and office of priest in the Church as it had in times when the Church of England was in the Catholic Communion. 

Dix’s argument that the broader rite provides the context in which the prayer of consecration/ordination should be understood is somewhat validated by the fact that Leo did not only judge the form deficient because of the wording of the prayers of consecration/ordination, but because the rite lacked the “transmission of instruments.”  In the Catholic Rite, both before the Protestant Reformations and still at the time of Leo XIII, there was “the transmission” to the newly ordained of the “instruments” of his office.  The new bishop was presented with his miter, his staff, and his ring.  The new priest is presented with the chalice and paten with which he will celebrate the Eucharist.  With some minor changes, this is still part of the Catholic ritual.  (In addition in the Catholic Rite, the deacon is given the Book of the Gospels with a particularly impressive charge to believe, preach, and live the Gospel.)  In the Ordinal used for the consecration of Archbishop Parker, the only “instrument” given the new bishop is the Bible.  Leo saw the failure to transmit the instruments proper to the Office as part of the defect of form even though it was not part of the consecrating prayer, giving credence to Dix’s claim that the prayer must be viewed in context of the entire ritual.   Pius XII in 1948, however, contradicted Leo’s argument saying that the transmission of instruments is not an essential part of the Sacrament and therefore not a requirement for validity.

Defect of Intention is the second point we need to look at.  Leo argued that the authors of the Anglican Ordinals of 1549, 1550, 1552, and 1559 did not intend to convey the “power” to offer Sacrifice; that conferring a “sacrificing priesthood” was outside their intention.  Leo has a point; if one reads Thomas Cranmer on the Eucharist he certainly does not accept the idea that the celebrant of the Eucharist is offering a Sacrifice.  This idea that Christ is somehow sacrificed on every altar at every Mass was repugnant to all the Reformers from Luther to Zwingli who maintained, in accord with the Letter to the Hebrews, that Christ was sacrificed once for all. 

Unfortunately the historical/critical method of scriptural interpretation was not available to either Catholics or Reformers in the sixteenth century, and much of the Patristic Tradition which had elaborated the relationship of the Eucharist to Calvary was also either unknown or ignored.  One of the great tragedies with the rise of scholastic thought in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries was the supplanting of the rich heritage of the Church Fathers with a cold abstract Aristotelian logic that stripped our Catholic faith of its flesh like a predatory animal strips the flesh from the skeleton. (You can see that I am not a fan of scholasticism.)  Consequently many Catholic theologians had an exaggerated (to the point of heresy) understanding of the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist and many Protestants totally rejected the idea of Eucharistic Sacrifice out of hand rather than carefully nuancing it in the light of scripture and patristics.  At the end of the day Parker and his consecrators need to be given the benefit of the doubt for while they may have rejected the currently popular Catholic ideas of “The Sacrifice of the Mass” their intention was to do what Christ did and pass on to the future what the Apostles had passed on in their days and was passed on down to them.  Thus you get the conflict between “explicit intention” and “implicit intention.”  It is clear that the intention to do what Christ commands, while perhaps wrongly understood, is sufficient intention. 

Thus at the end of the day, we have valid consecrators with valid intention conferring the Sacrament of Orders (to the Order of Bishop) on a valid (though illicit, since it was without papal approval) candidate according to a formula Pope Leo determined to be deficient. Thus the matter of continuity of the Apostolic Succession depends on the validity of the Ordinal of 1552 which was used in Parker’s consecratin.  We will look more at this in a future posting.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXIV: Crying Wolf: The Question of Valid Orders, continued

In the previous post we looked at the issue of the “validity” of sacraments and I mentioned that while claims that the sacramental systems of rival groups within the Church (and without) were invalid stretch all the way back into the third and fourth centuries, the criteria we use today—matter, form, minister, and intention—emerge in the Middle Ages with the switch to scholastic theology from the patristic theology of the first millennium. 
We looked at “matter” and “correct minister” in that earlier posting.  Matter is the material—bread and wine for the Eucharist, water for baptism, etc. necessary for the sacrament.  The correct minister is the person having the authority to administer the sacrament—in some cases a bishop, in others a priest, in the case of baptism and matrimony, a lay person can be the minister of the sacrament.  In this post, we will look at “form” and “intention.”  The “form” are the words used, the formula for administering the sacrament.  The “form” of baptism is “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”   In Penance, or Reconciliation as it is sometimes known, it is “I absolve you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” 
There can be much variety in form.  In the Eastern Rites, followed by Byzantine Catholics (among others) as well as Orthodox, sacramental formulae are usually in the passive voice: “The Servant of God, N., is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  Ever since the days of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the form for the Eucharist has been: This is my Body; This is the Chalice of my Blood…”  But about twenty years ago a question came to the congregation of Rites regarding an ancient Eucharistic Liturgy, the Holy Qurbana of Addai and Mari used in the East Syrian Tradition since apostolic times, in which there are no such “words of Instiution.”  That is to say, the bishop or priest never says: “This is my Body; This is my Blood.”  Faced with an apostolic tradition to the contrary, the Catholic Church backed down about the necessity of having these words for a “valid” Mass.  Moreover, while the Western Church had claimed that the Words of Institution were essential to the Eucharist, the Eastern Church—Catholic and Orthodox, always claimed that the Epiclesis, the Prayer calling down the Holy Spirit, was the actual consecratory prayer.  The various approved Rites of the Church do not all follow the same formulae in administering the sacraments so we need to be clear that there is no one set of words required for a sacrament—any sacrament—to be valid.  There is legitimate variety in sacramental form. 
As for “intention”—this is the trickiest of all criterion.  If a priest says the right words, but does not intend to forgive the penitent, is the penitent forgiven?  If a priest says “This is my Body” but does not himself believe that in the Eucharist the bread becomes the Body of Christ, does the bread remain only bread?   If a priest, in his dotage, goes into a bakery and says: “This is my Body,” does all the bread in the bakery become the Sacrament of the Eucharist?
Here is the real rub that we must consider: if a bishop, in ordaining a priest, intends to ordain him for preaching but not for offering the Eucharistic Sacrifice, is the man validly ordained?   And what, if in addition to not intending to ordain a sacrificing priest, the bishop uses words that do not mention that the priest is being ordained to offer sacrifice—does the “form” prove to be insufficient for validity?  And what if, the bishop himself is not a validly ordained bishop—is then the priest not a validly ordained priest?   Keep these questions in mind as they will become very important points of dispute between the Anglican and Papal parties and continue today to be unresolved points of dispute.
It will take a while for this issue to surface.  When Henry VIII separated the Anglican Church from Communion with the Papacy, he did not change any theology.  Nor did the liturgy—including the rites of Ordination—change in Henry’s day.  The bishops and priests ordained under Henry were validly ordained. No one disputes that.  But after Henry’s death, during the reign of his son, King Edward VI, there were changes in the ritual and changes in the doctrine that raise serious questions about the continuation of sacramental life in the Anglican Communion.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXIII The Ecumenical Impact of Crying Wolf

CC

Before we continue our story on the development of the Anglican Church and in particular deal with its parting of the ways with the Roman Communion, we need to look at the topic of “validity of orders” so that when we get to the second phase of the English Reformation we will be able to put the decisions of papal authorities about the “validity” of Anglican Orders into an intelligible context.  The issue of “validity of orders” did not arise with the Reformers of the sixteenth century but is rooted in the struggles of the “Great Church” with various sects in Christian antiquity. 
So what do we mean by “The Great Church?”   Historians use the term “Great Church” to speak of mainline Christianity (as distinguished from the heretical sects that separated before the East/West schism of the eleventh century split it into what we today call Catholicism and Orthodoxy. In antiquity there were many groups which separated from mainline Christianity over doctrinal questions—the Novatianists, the Montantists, the Donatists—and the separations were bitter events, marked by polemics on both sides.
They say that history is written by the winners.  There is truth to that. In the same way, Orthodoxy is defined by the winners, or at least by the survivors.  Today we look on groups such as the Donatists or the Collyridians or the Ophites as “heretical,” but in their day they were viable communities of men and women fighting for what they believed to be true doctrine.  No one is a heretic in his own understanding.  Some groups we define today as heretical—the Arians come to mind—came very close to winning the battle to claim orthodoxy. Politics, History, and Economics—as well as personalities—play a major role in defining religious orthodoxy.   
One of the strategies used in these contests for the faith of the masses was to deny the legitimacy of one’s opponent’s access to the Divine.  “God does not hear their prayers…”  Claims and counter claims were made by all parties regarding the legitimacy of the baptism, of the Eucharist, and of the sacramental orders of their rival groups.  These arguments were not made over any substantial defects such as “form” or “matter” that would be used in later and more sophisticated arguments.  It was simply asserted that since the “faith” held by the opposing party was “wrong,” obviously the life of grace had no hold on them and their sacraments were void of any effective means of God’s grace. 
Such arguments commit a sort of lèse majesté against God—presuming that we have the ability to turn the faucet of grace off and on according to our whims, but then Jesus did say that we what bind on earth is bound in heaven.  Nonetheless, the historian must look differently on this than the theologian and see the crudeness of the ruse such allegations employ to win adherents  by undermining the credibility of the ranks of one’s opponents. 
We have looked at the rival claims to the papacy in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.  (cf January 15, January 24, June 6, June 8, June 18, August 5, December 7, 2011;  February 14, 2013).  Here too the issue of “valid orders” came into play as various popes declared the ordinations performed by their predecessors “invalid” or “validated” the ordinations of earlier predecessors—all depending on which political alliances they represented.  Such declarations that “orders” were “invalid” removed all of one’s predecessor’s allies from positions of power—annulling cardinals and bishops and archdeacons and permitting the new pope to replace potential enemies with his own allies.  These claims were often used in the various anti-pope crises of the twelfth century but the introduction of the scholastic method of theology in the twelfth and thirteenth century demanded an explanation that was both more explicit and more rational than simply polemic rantings. 
Scholastic Theology and in particular the work of Thomas Aquinas gave those who held power in the Church the tools they needed to disempower those with whom they disagreed.  Thomas’ work neatly defined sacraments in categories of “matter” and “form” and spoke of the “intention” of the minister.  All the ducks had to be lined up in a row. The exactly right matter had to be employed.  There had to be bread, for example, for the Eucharist and it had to be wheat bread.  And there had to be grape wine.  For baptism there had to be water—not beer, nor wine, nor even iced tea—but water, pure and simple.  Confirmation required chrism.  Penance required a sinner with sins to be forgiven.  Matrimony required one man and one woman, neither of whom had been properly married before.  Ordination required man eligible for ordination. (Among other requirements, he had to have two intact hands and [at least] two intact testicles.  I am not sure why the later was an essential requirement but it did prevent the ordination of eunuchs.) 
One had to have the right minister for the sacrament.  While a priest or deacon was ordinary for baptism, anyone could do in an emergency.  (There was, at times, argument over this with some insisting that only an ordained priest or bishop could baptize.)  After 1215, the Church taught that only a priest or bishop could absolve sins.  Only a Bishop or Priest could preside at the Eucharist or anoint the sick.  In the Western Church it came to be held that the husband and wife ministered the sacrament to each other; in the East it required a priest or bishop to minister the sacrament.  It would be debated up until the Council of Trent—and even afterwards as not all theologians have agreed—that only a bishop could ordain another bishop, a priest, or a deacon.  There also has been disagreement over whether a priest can confirm or whether it requires a bishop—contemporary Catholic thought permits it to the priest under certain circumstances but this was not always the case in the sixteenth century.  In the Eastern Churches the priest is the ordinary minister of “chrismation” as the sacrament is often called. 
We need to consider all this background and debate because at the time of the Reformation the Catholic Church will begin to claim that the various groups that break from it have “invalid orders.”  They will give a rationale for that claim—a lack of form or matter or intention.  But the historian always looks at it a bit skeptically, hearing the little boy who cried wolf.      

Valid Orders?

The Posthumous trial of Pope Formosus known as

the Cadaver Synod

Not too long ago I did an entry on the Third Lateran Council, an Ecumenical Council recognized by the Western Church (not by the Eastern Churches) held in 1179 that among other things, condemned Peter Waldo as well as the Cathars, reaffirmed the mandate for clerical celibacy, forbad charging fees for administration of the sacraments, condemned usury, and decreed that clergy guilty of sodomy should be deposed from their offices.  All well and good.  But there was another decree that I want to explore and that is that the Third Lateran Council decreed the ordinations performed by anti-popes Victor IV, Pascal III, and Callixtus III were “null and void.”  I want to look at the subject of “valid” and “invalid” orders as it has repercussions on the Church today.  
     Basically what the Council was saying was that priests, bishops, and deacons (as well as subdeacons and the minor orders in use at the time) ordained by these three false claimants to the papacy were invalidly ordained to their respective Orders.  Why?  Were they ordained according to a defective rite?  No, the rite was the same rite used by the Bishops of Rome in ordinations.  Did the candidates or the ordaining prelates have faulty intention?  No, the ordaining bishops intended to ordain the men according to the mind of the Church regarding the sacraments and the men being ordained presumably had sound intentions as well.   The only reason for declaring the rival ordination as null and void was to challenge the authority of the papal rivals.  You can be sure that these various antipopes had challenged the validity of the ordinations of Alexander III who is today recognized as having been the legitimate claimant to the papal throne but who, in his own time, was initially recognized by only a minority of bishops while Victor and his successors, Pascal and Callixtus,  were thought by many of their contemporaries to have the most authentic claim to the Chair of Peter.  You may remember the papal imbroglio at the time of Pope Formosus (reigned 891-896) when the dead Pope was exhumed by his successor but one, Stephen VI, who convoked a synod, had Formosus posthumously deposed, and declared that the ordinations he had performed were null and void.  Stephen’s successor but one, Theodore II, (reigned for twenty days in December 897), declared the ordinations of Formosus to have been valid and those of Stephen to have been null and void.  The next two popes, John IX and Benedict IV, upheld the ordinations of Formosus—in fact John had been ordained priest by Formosus—but then Sergius III came along (904-911) and declared the ordinations of Formosus to have been null and void.  What is going on???  It has nothing to do with sacramental theology but with claims of legitimacy and political power.  
       The undermining of opposition within the Church by declaring the ordinations of the opposition leaders was not new to the tenth century any more than it was to the Church at the time of Lateran III.  In the debates of the second through the sixth centuries with the various factions such as the Montanists and the Donatists claimed exclusive validity of the sacraments and denied the validity of the ordinations in the “Great Church” (the mainline Church in which both Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their roots) and these splinter groups in turn had their ordinations condemned as invalid by the bishops who clung to the Apostolic faith.  
      All this is by way of saying that at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the papacy pulled out this canard once again in declaring “invalid” the ordinations of the various "Protestant” Churches.  By this point they had to do more than declare; they needed to give a rationale and the development of scholastic theology with its breakdown of matter, form, and intention gave them a theological apparatus by which they could rationalize this but it was still basically a political and not a theological decision.  It was only by devising a theological justification robbing the Churches of the Reformers of sacramental character that they could undermine the confidence of the believers in the Reformed Churches.  Now, I am not going to say that all “Protestant” Churches have maintained a continuity of apostolic succession in their clergy.  For many—especially in the second and later waves of the Reformation—this was not even a concern, but the case of the Scandinavian (Lutheran)  and Anglican Churches merits very close study.  Furthermore, while the Council of Trent taught that only a bishop possesses the “fullness of the priesthood” and thus only a bishop can ordain priests, there are historical instances of presbyteral ordination (ordination of priests by priests), recognized by Rome, at least up to the thirteenth century.  I seem to recall an instance as late as the sixteenth century of a Bull authorizing presbyteral ordinations in the Spanish missions of Mexico, but it may have been authorizing a priest to ordain deacons which would be a somewhat different question.  If presbyteral ordination can be shown to have a legitimate place in the history of the Church, that also opens the door to German Lutheran as well as Reformed Church orders.  Again, I only write from a historical perspective and make no claims to theology but perhaps in future entries we will look more closely at Catholic objections to Anglican and Lutheran Orders and even the very concept of Sacramental Validity—from a historical perspective.